Interoperability Success Stories

If you spend any time writing software, you’ll eventually hit an interoperability wall: two components that should talk to each other just refuse to do so.

Maybe it’s a web API that has just been modified without proper concern for backward compatibility, breaking your existing application in the process. Or perhaps you’re trying to use two middleware products together, only to find that the communication standard they implement is horrendously complex, causing each vendor to interpret it ever-so-slightly differently and making them completely useless when brought together.

For all of the many painful incompatibilities of the past, there are plenty of wonderful success stories of software and specifications that enabled collaboration and integration in myriad ways. You just don’t hear them praised that often.

Here are some examples of technologies that do their job, and then get out of the way.

HTTP

HTTP has had all kinds of criticisms leveled at it over the years, and yet it prevails. It’s the basis for all web traffic and the vast amounts of secure e-commerce conducted over it, and a whole lot more besides.

A lot of its power comes from incredible simplicity: both computers and humans can understand HTTP commands and headers. Whether you’re a proxy server or an overworked systems admin, HTTP is easy to deal with. A proliferation of tools have been built to support it, further strengthening its foothold.

And heck, it must be good given that after 20 years it’s still only at version 1.1.

TCP/IP

Without the adoption of TCP/IP as the network protocol of choice for the Internet, the world would be a very different place. Coming up on nearly four decades of existence, the ubiquitous packet-switching protocol that is used in almost every server, desktop, laptop and mobile device has become synonymous with the word “networking.”

When was the last time you had a network issue that could be blamed on a deficiency of the TCP/IP specification? Or the last time you had one vendor’s TCP/IP stack fail to correctly implement the protocol?

The world loves IP addresses (well, maybe it loves DNS names more), and they’re here to stay. Why? Because a group of very smart people engineered a beautifully flexible and truly usable technology. And while there are some very compelling improvements being made (or proposed) right now, this outstanding work from the mid-1970’s still benefits us all today.

JSON

I’ll admit it: I can’t read XML. My eyes simply glaze over the never-ending stream of < and > characters and the duplicated start and end tags. At its basic level, it’s a reasonable language for handling unstructured data, but the awful complexity sometimes laid upon it (XML Schema and SOAP come to mind) can make it very tiresome to deal with. For many years, it seemed like every new software standard that appeared just had to be specified in XML, regardless of its suitability for the problem at hand. It looked like we were going to be stuck with it forever. And then along came JSON.

JSON evolved within the world of JavaScript but quickly won favor with engineers everywhere as a tremendously useful and simple data format. For one thing, it is completely readable, certainly more so than XML, at least to my eyes. It is also fast to parse because it doesn’t have to go through a secondary validation step to ensure compliance to some overbearing schema. Instead, semantic validation can be performed at the application level, if desired.

Now you’ll find JSON as the underlying syntax in most popular web APIs. It’s even being used as the storage format for new databases. Every modern web browser has native and efficient support for it. And when was the last time you found that your browser or parsing library failed to process valid JSON? Certainly I’ve never encountered that problem. Thank its wonderfully concise grammar for making it so easy for parsers to be created in so many different languages.

There are more…and we need even more

There are plenty of success stories to be found related to well-designed interoperability standards that have spurred innovation by being interoperable. Specifications like the Java Virtual Machine and the CLI are prime examples of hugely successful standards. But why do many other standards find it hard to get an adoption foothold?

The answer is simple. Or, to put it another way, the answer is: simple.

Interoperability standards succeed when engineers are able to adopt them en masse, and that is most likely to happen if the standard is as simple as possible. Specifications that try to boil the ocean will solve little of value because their complexity will lead to less acceptance in the developer community.

Good engineers will usually take the path of least resistance in their work, so if a standard is too complex it can quickly get ignored in favor of an alternative grassroots-driven solution or even incompatible vendor-driven extensions. Conversely, if useful tools exist that lower a developer’s barrier to entry (for example IDE support, SDKs, etc), a standard can be adopted more rapidly.

The software market cares about getting stuff done easily and quickly. If an interoperability standard helps in that regard, it will likely get adopted – regardless of whether it was designed by a committee or a community.